How To Rank Well With Off Page Optimization

Many people get it wrong when it comes to off page optimization factors that can help your website rank well in the search engines. One of the most important things Google looks at (other search engines too) is the quality of inbound links coming into a website. And these links should be coming from websites with a page rank (PR) of 3 and above that are relevant to your pages and have great content on their site. It’s about the quantity of the inbound links as well as the quality.

I would say that the quality of inbound links would outweigh even the quantity of inbound links. But be sure that when you link from another site into your pages that it’s a quality site and not a site that Google would consider a spam website.

Today many people are using wordpress blogs and other blogs. With content management systems, it’s easier to get your content published on other people’s blogs as a Guest Blogger. So Guest Blogging is a big buzz word now where you approach another webmaster and contribute quality content to their website and ask them to leave the links within your content in place. You want the links that are pointing to your page to contain anchor text which are keyword phrases relevant to the page it’s pointing to. This is a great off page optimization technique.
Also, the keyword phrase you’re trying to get page ranked high for. So you definitely want to make sure that you put the correct anchor text in the content. Furthermore, you want to make sure the link is a “do follow”. "Do follow" links are extremely important in the backlinking process.

Some bloggers will allow you to post articles on their site, but they’ll put the “no follow” tag, which means the Google spiders won’t pass on that page rank when they follow it through to the other destination. So make sure you seek out websites that allow, “do follow” to make the transaction worth it.

Sometimes you’ll run across websites that may have a PR of 1 or 2 and they are up and coming. Don’t Always avoid those sites. It’s good to get in and maybe publish on their site while they’re young and on the upswing and they will remember you later on when they do get more authority and age on their site and they’ll be more willing to work with you. Make sure the site has very strong content, is well laid out and clean. A lot of off page optimization is built this way.

You also don’t want to have your links on a page where there are too many other outgoing links. The fewer outgoing links the better. You don’t want to have a link on a page where there’s a large amount of outgoing links that dilutes or diminishes the amount of authority that would be passed on.
Another off page optimization factor that search engines look at is age of a website. Age of a website shows stability. If you’ve been on the web for just a few months, it’s going to be tougher to compete with a site that’s been on the web for several years.

Google does take into the consideration the age of a site. Also the size of the site matters. If you’re going to be posting on a site that has a lot of pages, they usually have a lot more authority based on the amount of pages.

Another off page optimization factor would be directories. Google looks to see if you have high quality and respectable directories linking to your site which is a plus if that’s the case. If the directory is human edited (humans have to evaluate your website), the search engines favor those much more than a directory you can just slap content into and call it a link. DMOZ is a directory that Google pulls most of it’s listings from.
It’s a free submission but it’s a VERY tough directory to get into. If you can’t get into DMOZ, don’t sweat it. The Yahoo directory is on the same level and they are not as fickle as DMOZ. You do have to pay a fee of $299 to get listed and some feel that it’s worth it and other do not. Personally, it has done us well for us. There are 2nd tier directories such as Clush, Looksmart and Joeant. The fees aren’t as high, but you do get “do follow” links and they are PRs of 5.

Google is also now looking at user and visitor behavior. If they see people coming to your site and bouncing right off of your site (hitting the back button to the SERP), that’s not good. You definitely want to see a bounce rate of less than 50%.

Pay closer and closer attention to other user behavior such as how many pages deep they go into your site. The search engines also look at whether your site is being mentioned in social media, if you have any buzz going on in Facebook or Twitter. Press releases can also get you inbound links.

In conclusion, never fall for any link building schemes. Any kind of link farms, which are people promising to get you thousands of links coming into your site. Those are definitely red flags. Getting involved with services like this can actually get you dropped from the search results, so don’t fall for any of these kind of services. Let human behavior and the quality of your content get the natural links coming into your site and you WILL begin to see your pages move up in the rankings. This is the best way to get real off page optimization.